created 2025-04-03, & modified, =this.modified
rel: Hans Haacke
On Ice Stick:
A “sculpture” that physically reacts to its environment can no longer be regarded as an object. The range of outside factors affecting it, as well as its own radius of action, reach beyond the space it materially occupies. It thus merges with the environment in a relationship that is better understood as a “system” of interdependent processes. These processes evolve without the viewer’s empathy. They become a witness. A system is not imagined; it is real.
Haacke has long argued that what we do and say should never be seen as discrete or dis-locatable from the world at large.
Factors:
The myriad outside factors that might affect our words and deeds are not always evident — in truth they are often obscure, and often so deliberately so — just as our own radius of action is difficult to accurately gauge. It’s precisely for these reasons that Haacke has so insistently made the case that the complex, interpenetrating systems that influence our expressions and behaviors deserve careful, critical investigation.
News:
The first incarnation of News was born in 1969, out of Haacke’s desire, he said, to break down “the barriers between what is presumed to be this secluded and holy sphere that we call art, from the rest of the world, which is dirty politics.”
In 1969, he took a telex machine and put it in Städtische Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf as part of an exhibition called “Prospect 69.” It was continuously receiving wires from the German press agency DPA. The next month, he showed it at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York, where it spit out English wires from UPI. In 1970, at the Jewish Museum, he set up five different Telex machines, which simultaneously spit out the news.
News was less shocking, maybe, but it was the most literal realization of his desire to break down the boundaries of the gallery space.
Blue Sail
Features an oscillating fan that blows against a ten-foot veil of blue chiffon held in place with fishing weights and thread. While offering a poetic formal statement, this piece also speaks to the limits of individualism within a system of constant economic and political micromanagement and calls for a conscious and transparent engagement with society.
